Argh! Lost my work again! Why doesn't Rapidweaver autosave

Good point @teefers

Thanks for those two suggestions @AngelArs I will check them out, although must say, apart from Rapidweaver I rarely have a problem these days. I think that is partly because I am operating in the cloud more and more.

When I’m not typing text, I am mousing with my right hand, and my left hand stays fixed on Command-S, which I tap with frequency. Learned the hard way. Fact is RW hangs… fact is we want to save our work, so hang onto Command-S with your left hand. That’s my macro.

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Same here. Worked all day on this and RW crashed and it all went down the toilet. I don’t know of another app that doesn’t autosave. It’s effing ridiculous.

Good call! I should have done that. Argh!!!

Sorry to hear that it got you too. I’m just not into the habit of saving things these days but clearly we need to get back into that habit.

I’m going to have to do as Das suggests and start getting into the habit of hitting cmnd-s every few minutes.

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Your reply from support doesn’t make sense and is very worrying. What if you have a very big site in Rapidweaver. You can’t possibly be expected to recreate years worth of effort.

I’m sorry, I don’t mean this to sound condescending or dismissive but if you use a Mac for any kind of production you 1) CMD S constantly. And you 2) buy an external drive and set up Time Machine so you have hourly backups of everything.

Ive been a Mac-based designer and retoucher for 25 years. (Before that was Amiga!) My system now consists of two RAID 5 systems, one for work and then a 12 TB RAID 5 just for ™ backups. I can’t afford to lose any work and I never, ever EVER do anymore because of this setup. Learned the hard way more than a decade ago.

Of course RW shouldn’t be hanging during publishing, but when we start adding hundreds of stacks it’s bound to happen.

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Lol!

I don’t want to sound condescending back Steve, but I stopped using RAID arrays years ago and haven’t touched Time Machine for many years. Both are a bit too 2008 for me :wink:

Haven’t you heard of cloud technology Steve. Everything I do is backed up in real time to Dropbox and two other cloud services (just in case - like the redundancy you get via a RAID). At least two of these tools have versioning so I can go back in time, but rarely find it to be necessary.

As for pressing CMD-S I’m sorry, I have to confess it is a keystroke combination I rarely use these days. When I first started in computing in the 1980s it was the golden rule, but we’re in 2019 now :slight_smile:

Yes, ten years ago I was still in that habit, but there’s hardly anything on my computer these days, or any web apps that I use, that require me to even save let alone do it manually.

All of these things like RAID arrays, backup software, and remembering to save by hitting a button or pressing CMD-S really are a bit old-fashioned IMHO. Things have moved on, at least for me they have. Many (probably most) SAAS apps autobind so the only reason a save button might exist is because it gives users peace of mind. It is actually a redundant button in many SAAS apps.

I know none of the above is true about Rapidweaver, and I accept I will have to get back in to the habit of hitting CMD-S every few minutes (I’ve also created macros to do it for me now whenever I preview or publish), but I think it would be better if Rapidweaver followed the trend and reintroduced autosave for those who want/need it. For those who don’t want it because their needs are different - I totally get that - then it should definitely be possible to toggle it off. Then everyone is happy.

Can I just ask Steve, out of technical interest, why do you not ditch the RAID and the Time Machine and just use Dropbox (or similar)? Is it for security reasons?

I can’t speak for Steve but I’ll say this… What if my cable goes out and I don’t have access to a “Cloud” system? What if my “Cloud” system goes out of business overnight? What if my Cloud system is shut down due an entire east coast going “dark.”???

What you going to do then?

Disk is cheap… I keep a bootable image of my system disk with me at all times. Yes, even when I leave the house (in case of fire or theft at my home). I can take my little pocket drive, connect it to another Mac, and be 100% up and running in the time it takes to boot.

With Cloud, it would take days to download and reproduce what I have on disk.

I could care less how old the technology is… or what it is… I use Dropbox, iCloud, Time Machine, Pocket Drives ALL TO MY ADVANTAGE. I WANT TO BE THE DRIVER. I don’t want to have someone else drive for me. And thus… don’t autosave when I don’t want the project saved. ONLY I KNOW when I want my project to be saved.

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Excellent points about the power outage and you’re right, offline in general has some benefits.

I just figure if all three of my cloud storage go out of business at the same time and I happen to, at the same time, lose all my work, then the whole world is probably in the brown stuff big time.

We have high speed Broadband everywhere around her so restoring a terabyte or data in a day would be pretty easy.

I used to use all sorts of drives and backup tools but I’m hopelessly disorganised with that kind of thing and so cloud solutions work so much better for me. I confess I don’t use icloud as I do find that a bit second rate, but the other clouds I use seem to be incredibly fast in both directions.

As you say, there’s defo some advantages to offline storage, but I suppose we are all best just using what we feel works best for us and for me that is the cloud.

As for cloud suppliers going bust I just can’t see Amazon falling off a cliff any time soon.

And like you I too know when I want my project saved and that is all the time :slight_smile: I do however, as far as saving is concerned ‘SaveAs’ a new version every time I do any major work. So at the moment I am on v4y which is the 25th revision of version 4, and I do have all the previous ones backed up on three clouds just in case.

Just to add to the discussion :slight_smile:

I have a USB-C Samsung T5 1Tb SSD drive that is tiny and FAST (fast as the internal SSD drive in my MacBook Pro).

This goes with me everywhere and has my most critical backups and my training videos and courses (I’m always in a continuous learning mode :slight_smile:)

I also make extensive use of cloud based technologies.

And I go back to the late 70’s (on Mainframes) …

I only briefly got exposed to mainframes in my first job and at uni so sounds like we’ve both seen a few developments.

As I said before I think whatever works for you is the way to go. Some like physical, some prefer cloud some go both ways - and it is all good.

But I still think autosaving should be an option that you can turn off (if you are good at the DIY method) or on if you’re prone to going into the zone and forgetting to eat let alone press cmd-s every two minutes and as a result losing that amazing work you’ve just done due to Rapidweaver hanging.

I think we are all different and as far as possible we should all be allowed to have the workflow that best suits our needs and personalities.

Hey all. One option here might be ForeverSave 2. It autosaves in pretty much every app I have, RapidWeaver included. You get a lot of control over how often, how many versions to keep, and more.

ForeverSave works with an internal “vault” – it saves complete versions of every document. So if you have a 5GB Photoshop file and keep 10 versions, then ForeverSave’s vault will contain ten separate 5GB files for that document. Depending on your frequency and # of versions, it can grow to use a lot of disk space.

The point is that you’ll have a number of previous versions you can open if something goes wrong.

Now, the semi-downside is, support for it is pretty negligible. The developer hasn’t updated it in a long time, and can take weeks to respond, or doesn’t respond at all.

But – it works now, it will work with Catalina, and it’s the only app I’ve found that does this. It’s been invaluable to me several times.

One final caveat – if you do use it, there’s a prefs setting called “Do not show save reminder” that you should leave UNCHECKED. This forces ForeverSave to ask you before saving a document for the first time. Trust me–you want this. Otherwise you could open a document/project you plan to base a new one on, and it would save over your original before you get to “Save As” the new doc.

Anyway. Here’s the link, check it out, and it might be what you’re looking for.
https://toolforcesoftware.com/foreversave/

B

Regarding the supposed “corruption”: yes, the answer from support doesn’t make sense. Why can I see everything in the preview or in Safari? Why does the export and the upload always fail at the same step? If there is corruption I’d expect the fail to occur at the corrupt page.

This has nothing to do with the subject of the post. This post is about autosave.

If you’re experiencing a problem with preview or export I’d probably create a new post and give a detailed description of the exact problem you’re having. Someone here on the forum might have some suggestions on fixing the issue you’re having.

@teefers: the topic of the post is not being able to publish.

@bwil. If you read the title “why doesn’t RapidWeaver autosave” and you read most of the replies I think you’ll see it’s about automatic saving and alternatives to saving your work.

The original post does mention “hanging on publishing” but was looking more for an autosave feature to recover lost work.

I just think if what you’re looking for is help with previewing or publishing issues than a new post would probably get more attention from others.

Sigh… if you read the original post then you see that I wrote about “hanging on publishing”, too. And no, I don’t have any problems with previewing or publishing except that wonderful hang. Where the Rapidweaver folks told me that my project was corrupted.

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